Text Formatting ⇒ Parentheses in non-math Text

[Stephanie_L]

Hello all,

I am extremely new to LaTeX. In fact, I've been using it for approximately 24 hours. For the most part, things are running smoothly; however, the last two (2) hours have been dedicated to struggling with a rather vexatious problem. In short, my efforts to typeset a paper are being stymied by an error associated with the following footnote:

Barker, “Typography and the Meaning of Words: the Revolution in the Layout of Books in the Eighteenth Century”, in Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehten Jahrhundert: The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Proceedings of the Fifth Wolfenbütteler Symposium, November 1–3, 1977, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswedell & Co., 1981), 127–166 (133–134, 150–151).

After determining that the parentheses were responsible for the error message, I modified the tail-end of the citation to:

[…] Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian \left(Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswedell & Co., 1981\right), 127–166 \left(133–134, 150–151\right).

Although this solved the problem for the first set of parentheses, the second set continues to generate an error message. Presumably this is because only numerals and punctuation occur between them, and LaTeX assumes that this stretch of text is an equation gone wrong. (Obviously, it isn't. I don't use equations, but I do use heaps of punctuation: I am a grad student in the humanities).

Does anyone have insight into how I might resolve this issue? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you in advance,


s.l.

[localghost]

You should do some basic reading, especially as a beginner [1]. The error has nothing to do with the parentheses. They are characters like any others. The culprit is the ampersand ("&") which is reserved for LaTeX and serves as alignment character in several environments (see log file). You have to use \& to get it printed in the final output.

And do not use the \left and \right commands. They only work in math mode and their purpose is to automatically scale delimiters (parentheses, brackets, braces, …) with respect to the enclosed content.

[1] View topic: LaTeX Resources for Beginners


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[Stephanie_L]

Hello,

Indeed, I did read the introductory material, and thus caught & corrected the other ampersands in my text — early this morning, actually. Nonetheless, I missed that one. (Too many hours in a row in front of my MacBook, apparently: screen fatigue is setting in).

Thank you for taking the time to point it out.


s.l.